Guarding his job

>> Verdun resident’s age-old fight for reinstatement enters new phase

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photo by Jason Felker

Deepak Messand wants to return to his full-time job as a security guard at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza on Sherbrooke and Berri. He’s been fighting to do so since 1988. So this week he has launched a wrongful dismissal claim for $35,000 against his former employers.

The Verdun resident’s tale of woe starts in 1988, when he suffered a back injury on the job and went on workman’s compensation. But when he was cleared to return in January 1991, his employer refused to take him back. So Messand took his case to the Commission de la santé et sécurité de travail (CSST) and won a decision rewarding him $19,0895 and ordering the employer to take him back on his 40-hour-a-week, Monday-to-Friday schedule.

His boss, Fehim Sofraci, appealed the decision at the Bureau de revision, but they again sided with Messand in July 1992. The hotel toyed with another appeal but backed off, so Messand brought it to the Superior Court, which made the decision binding and final. “But they still didn’t give me full-time work,” says Messand.

Messand, whose many political activities have included a month-long hunger strike to support natives during the Oka crisis, ran as independent candidate in the federal elections in 1992 only to return from the hustings to find his work schedule reduced anew. So in December ’93 the CSST ordered his employers to take him back full-time and compensate Messand for lost wages.

The merry games continued as Holiday Inn appealed again, and in April 1994 the CSST reinstatement was maintained. A subsequent attempt to fire him didn’t fly so he was back on the job in May 1994 full time, but soon found his hours reduced again. Messand’s luck ran out the next year when a judge sided with Holiday Inn’s right to reduce his hours.
Messand blamed the result on his own lawyer, whom he unsuccessfully tried to have disciplined at the Bar, and in October 1996 Messand was let go again, apparently because he appeared in a photograph in La Presse attending Robert Bourassa’s funeral on a day he called in sick. “I had a doctor’s note, but they fired me anyway,” says Messand. That didn’t stick either and soon Messand was working on call one or two days a week.

The decisive moment in the battle occurred March 5, 1999, when he was called in at the last minute for a day shift and inspected a hall which had its lights on. “I was in there for two to five minutes, no more,” says Messand. But later colleagues would testify that Messand had dallied incommunicado for 20 minutes inside a room, which finally became grounds for a successful dismissal.

So begins the newest chapter of his struggle, with him acting as his own counsel in his civil suit, to which he lugs a file of 300 pages of past motions and another with 167 pages of such miscellany as photos he claims are of employees sleeping on the job. “I’m not fighting for myself. I’m fighting for other people,” says Messand. Hotel management would say little except that Messand will never work there again. “There’s no way that we’ll hire him back, under no circumstances will that happen. The line of trust has been broken,” says Holiday Inn’s director of operations Mounir Greiss. :